


Stories of Pain and Hope.

by I_Shouldnt_Be_Here



Category: Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020)
Genre: Author knows nothing at this point, Gen, I went HARD on the projection, I'll be honest this is just pain, No Dialogue, Rambling, Stream of Consciousness, TW: Self Harm, TW: suicidal thoughts, but I don't know, eh I'll probably delete this, vague allusions to Kartik being trans, watch me mouthpiece the fuck outta Kartik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27594544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Shouldnt_Be_Here/pseuds/I_Shouldnt_Be_Here
Summary: One nightmare, recreated across two (probably a lot more) people.
Relationships: Kartik Singh/Aman Tripathi
Comments: 11
Kudos: 14





	Stories of Pain and Hope.

**23 rd May, 2010. Wednesday.**

Kartik felt like he was going to fall off the single person bed, situated right in the middle of the room. He woke up feeling hot and cold at the same time, bundled up in a hoodie but he had kicked off the blanket mid sleep onto the floor.

The hood made his neck uncomfortably warm. He peeled it off his damp neck and chest.

There were two pillows kept of either side, Kartik had his arms around them like old buddies as he slept on his stomach. Arms, curved, drool marking the edge of the pillow and face pitching off the edge of the mattress. He woke up feeling as id an enormous wave would crash over him, leaving him soundless, only capable of making bubbles under the black saltwater’s surface. But then he realized it was him pitching off the bed, head a few inches off the floor that made him feel like that.

He got up, slowly, head heavy with pain and dizziness. Stared into the ceiling, with glassy eyes that did not notice the whirring blades of the fan slicing the semi darkness into pieces and flinging them to the corners of the room, only for the darkness to splatter and drip like viscous liquid onto the floor.

The darkness dripped, pooled and gathered around him. Viscous and sticky, if he extended his even a finger into this darkness he would be caught forever. The three pillows (two in his arms and one forgotten on the bed which had a head-shaped depression) were useless.

He stood up at stared at the raging ceiling fan directly. As if the spinning was to be taken _personally_ on all levels.

_All I feel these days is numbness and rage._

NumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRage NumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRage NumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRageNumbRage

The feelings (or lack thereof) hammered against his head as he stared at the ceiling fan. It seemed like one of them would have to give in to the other, mismatched opponents as they were. Kartik’s eyes watered, for a second the ceiling fan felt as if it was going to pitch and fall over his head.

A tattered book cover with a long note about the author popped up in his head, and now he knew without being very close to death (but much closer than he would have liked) by what Oscar Wilde meant by the quote,

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death”.

The wallpaper in question here was the ceiling fan.

No wonder every grief that ever existed had been lived and recorded many times regardless of the era.

He didn’t know whether that made it better or worse. Either it was an especially painful blow to teenage narcissism that every pain had been lived before or it was comfort, that every pain had been lived by writers and artists far more eloquent than himself to put words (that provided respite) against the pain.

His head bent down; the ceiling fan was the clear winner.

An immeasurable tide of rage swelled over his chest, washing over him like a wave of crushed glass, leaving him raw everywhere. He could feel sharp spikes of pain everywhere, inside his throat, coating the inside of his cheeks, burning the soles of his feet.

He checked his arms to see if he was bleeding.

No blood marked the almond coloured skin, but the thin, puffy pink scars that marked the arm were a reminder.

But the problem was, he _wanted_ to bleed. He wanted to see the white just underneath the brown skin. He wanted to see the white getting overpowered with bright red a few seconds later. He wanted to see the puffy pink shade after two weeks.

White, red and pink. He laughed bitterly. This was _anything_ but love.

He looked up at the ceiling fan, imagining his forgotten mother’s forgotten nylon dupatta, one end with the fan and the other with his neck.

He gasped, running his hands up and down his throat in a gesture of comfort. His head throbbed and his vision turned black at the edges as his mind fought hopelessly against itself.

He looked around for non-existent pieces of comfort. An absent blanket the weather was clearly too hot for, a plushie shaped shadow on the chair nobody bothered to task if he wanted (and he did, so _so_ dearly), absent smells of talcum powder, baby lotion and milk from illusory younger siblings.

These were ridiculous things to hope for.

He felt another layer growing upon his chest, fragile as an eggshell, constricting the ribcage inside into impossible shapes until each expansion of the lungs hurt like a sharp dart puncturing his throat.

Hands clutched around his head, mussing the short hair into wild tufts. He pressed the heel of the hands against his skull, trying to reduce the throbbing in his temples. His head compressed, while his chest felt like it was going to balloon and burst, along with the eggshell layers of numbness.

And explode it did. His chest swole and a rasping scream got buried in a pillow. And another, and yet another until his throat felt raw, and the screams devolved into almost soundless screeches.

He felt cracks developing over his body, parts of himself breaking away from each other until a pinprick of concentrated rage blew the pieces apart.

Rage, unlike no other, which had only one goal. Destruction.

Destruction of others or the destruction of self.

His mind ran into a hundred directions, tally marking every minor inconvenience, every wayward comment, every failed attempt at making others understand, like a personal scoreboard against the world that doubled up as a chip on his shoulder.

He projected his own rage onto people that birthed it. He imagined smashing the skull of the person who dashed his head against the wall at school with fists of steel. He imagined that person’s teeth shattering against the same wall where Kartik had bloodied his forehead.

He imagined slashing the tires of the men on the motorcycle who stopped him on the road only to hurl abuses at him. He imagined punches, kicks, smashed out teeth, fat blue bruises and splatters of thick, warm blood.

A hundred scenarios of violence and destruction crossed his mind. Revenge was the most beautiful fantasy.

But, it didn’t take long for the fantasy to become a nightmare.

His mind alternated between scenarios of violence, first with him as inflictor and another with him as victim with disturbing ease and a monotonous ping-pong intensity. Both the players were rage.

Then, he remembered a forgotten promise, one which wasn’t even clearly enunciated in words, until this very moment. He excavated that promise from the foggy depths of his brain, the place where his mother lived. (She was fading away every passing day.)

_Create when you want to destroy._

Those words hit him in the throat. An ineffable feeling spread underneath his skin like ants as he made a wild grab for his notebook.

He won’t be able to sleep so this was the second-best thing to do. The small notebook was filled with words which felt like he hacked them out of his intestines to burden the paper with.

He scrawled a few words onto the paper, mind running in a thousand directions under the influence of rage. Rage against this unfair world, which held people like him hostage in their own minds with no other escape except art and literature. Maybe a rare friend if you were lucky enough to find them.

…

Meanwhile the same nightmare was recreated seven hours away, in a town called Allahabad. A boy lingered on the edges of his mother’s bed, physically unable to rouse her. His heart hammered against his ribcage while his throat developed painful cracks because it was impossibly parched.

He closed his eyes, shook his head and walked back to his room.

And he punched the wall. Repeatedly.

Flakes of white skin peeled off his knuckles.

…

Some days the writing came easy, like he was fitting already-written lyrics perfectly to an improvised tune.

On other days, it felt like he was ejecting words, spitting out each one with a sputtering cough of pain. He felt like he was carefully serving dressed-up parts of himself, for the invisible audience inside his notebook to scavenge upon.

But, wasn’t his dearest wish to show others his words?

His invisible, imaginary audience could be real.

He imagined himself offering up words, sentences, poetry, fictions for a _real_ audience to steal a glance at. He felt like an indignity, but it was one he couldn’t _wait_ to subject himself to. A long-drawn out humiliation of the self via words. He knew he had no self-respect.

On the other hand, maybe he could weave stories of hope, ones which defeated the common narrative of trauma-bonding. If only he could make _his_ people believe in optimism again. To share joy as freely as they shared stories of pain.

As long as he could remember, his mind had been towing the drifting ends of dichotomies. To make them fit inside his head. To make them acceptable enough for tying into words.

He realised; he would be dead if he stopped writing. ‘Kartik’ and everything it represented would be dead if he gave up on his words.

He shook his head fiercely, trying to shake off the thick, sticky film of thought covering the inside of his skull. He looked at the first line scrawled in his notebook, it was a little dramatic but it would do.

_“What is life without a little taste of death?”_

…

**Author's Note:**

> Well, to be honest this is catharsis on my end. This doesn't mean to glorify depression/suicide/self harm at all. Please seek help if you need it.


End file.
